Press Release

Additional content from the UK's national broadcaster used to demonstrate 5G FWA in Arqiva and Samsung's London trial

London, UK, 07 November 2017 – Arqiva, the leading UK communications infrastructure and media services provider, has announced that it is now showing additional content from the UK’s national broadcaster, the BBC, in its 5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) trial.

The 5G wireless high bandwidth connectivity used in the trial implements intelligent beam-forming technology in high-frequency mmWave spectrum. The trial reliably achieves speeds in excess of 1 Gb per second, sufficient to deliver multiple bandwidth intensive UHD and VR streams, and demonstrates what high capacity connectivity could enable for content delivery in the future.

In order to simultaneously deliver multiple bandwidth intensive UHD and VR streams over the same 5G link, BBC R&D’s Turing encoder [http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/blog/2016-09-turing-codec], an H.265/HEVC open-source software video codec, was used to compress the content prior to its transmission. This crucial step significantly reduced the size of each stream and demonstrated the codec’s interoperability with the 5G wireless system, the state of the art displays and VR headgear.

“5G FWA is a tremendous opportunity to allow a much greater number of households to access ultra-fast broadband. Our London trial with Samsung has already gone a long way to proving the concept by establishing a stable downlink of in excess of 1Gb per second throughout a traditional British summer.

“The addition of the New Content Experiences from the BBC has added another dimension to the demo, bringing real-world examples of the type of content 5G FWA ultra-fast broadband could help deliver to households in the future.

“Our demo suite has been busy throughout the summer months and we have been delighted with the reaction from everyone who has witnessed the demo in person. For those unable to view in person we have also created a 360-degree virtual demo at www.arqiva5g.com.”

Andrew Murphy, BBC R&D said:

“As a technology to increase the availability of broadband to homes and businesses, 5G FWA could bring benefits to our audiences by making the BBC’s Internet-based services and new content experiences even more readily and widely available.”

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